scaleups

Back in January 2014 we had been selected to help drive the Startup Europe Partnership (SEP), the first pan-European open platform dedicated to supporting the growth and sustainability of European startups able to compete and raise funds at an international and global level.

The work done with Startup Europe Partnership and the SEP Matching Events in the past three years allowed us to “get our hands dirty” and experiment with various formats of startup-corporate collaboration.

Having organized over 20 international matching events, involving over 500 startups and 50 corporates from all over Europe, has allowed us to understand in depth what works and what not. Out of the 565 qualified meetings we organized – of which 359 crossborder – there have been 93 follow-ups. 19 deals have been closed, plus 40+ business discussions are ongoing.

We have gathered an important amount of data on the real success rates in the interaction between corporates and startups – which are between 2% and 5%. Startup – corporate interactions for collaboration normally start after 6 to 18 months, on average.

Immediately after the launch of the Startup Europe Partnership platform at the World Economic Forum in Davos we asked ourselves what the next step was.

With the new restyled version of Startup Europe Partnership (SEP 2.0) that will last throughout 2018 and 2019, Mind the Bridge and other partners (ELITE-London Stock Exchange, Europe Startup Network, Nesta, Scaleup Institute and Startup Olé) will leverage the experience accrued in the past years to foster IPOs, facilitate commercial and strategic partnerships and increase international visibility for European scaleups.

The ultimate goal is to scale our platform and help more scaleups to grow further.

The way to achieve this goal is represented by 4 large Scaleup Summits during which the best of the scaleup world (early stage startups are generally not a good match for companies), as well as of the corporate and the finance world (around 150 entities in total) will gather strictly behind closed doors. Goal is to strike deals and assess later stage funding options (such as private placements, venture debt, IPOs).

The 4 Summits will have two characteristics:

They will be hosted at the main European Stock Exchanges. In fact, stock exchanges are the other big missing link (our research tells us that only 2% of European scaleups have access to the stock exchange channel and that the big IPOs take place overseas) in the path of open innovation.

They will have an international pan-European dimension,involving scaleups, corporates and investors from all over Europe. Because one of the main limitations of many startup initiatives is their local or national character, within a much larger world.

The first Scaleup Summit will be organized at the Italian Stock Exchange in Milan on March 15th and 16th. London, Budapest and Lisbon will follow throughout 2018.

Alongside these major closed-door events, we will organize the fourth edition of SEC2SV. In fact, SEP had successfully launched Startup Europe Comes to Silicon Valley (SEC2SV) with the goal of exposing the best European scaleups to Silicon Valley investors and corporates.

SEP 2.0 will focus on launching a similar initiative called Startup Europe Comes to Israel (SEC2IL), a new annual mission that connects Europe with the Israeli entrepreneurial ecosystem.

SEP 2.0 will leverage the successful format of Startup Europe Comes to Silicon Valley with high-end meetings connecting scaleups and corporates and investors of the related ecosystem (Silicon Valley in the case of SEC2SV and Israel in the case of SEC2IL) and a large conference – the European Innovation Day (EID) – to stimulate the discussion among the ecosystem stakeholders.

We will also continue to crunch data. Beyond completing our mapping work of the European scaleup ecosystem through our SEP Monitors (the 2018 Scaleup Europe report is scheduled for release in April, while country reports will be published thereafter) and the startup exits (our annual analysis will be published in September), we will deep dive into the intrinsic motivations for scaleups going public and corporates working with startups (here is the link to our latest research on open innovation we published on the occasion of the Corporate Startup Stars Awards ceremony last December in Brussels).